October 04, 2007

Soliciting Comments on the Custom Color Scheme

Foul language welcome.

I'm trying to stick to the natural colors you see in the banner images.

And while I'm on the subject, I haven't been able to get the custom color pop-ups working right. I'd really rather the posting area were more tan/brown than it currently is. It's dangerously close to pink for my taste.

Back when I was working on user interfaces (which we troglodytes at the time referred to as "man-machine interfaces") we tried to avoid red tones. Humans tend to find green and blue relaxing, and red or orange tends to make us nervous

Good to know. I want to soften up the red a little more towards brown once Pixy gets the color selector working. I figured a Sedona/Southwest theme would be pretty easy to put together.

What I haven't found is a good color for the blog title that can stand out against all the different colors in the banner image rotation. The dark green show up most of the time, but it's still an ugly choice.

7
As of IE7, Microsoft has fixed alpha rendering of PNG files, which means they can have variable and partial transparency. The dropshadow could be implemented as a PNG file with a variable alpha channel, but it wouldn't display properly in IE6.

I think that's what Pixy has the banner creator doing. At home on IE 6, the various bits of text in the menu bars are scrambled because they are partially-transparent images. But in both cases, it looks like the transparent dropshadow is rendered over a white background, without regard for the color of the real background.

I'm still not discounting the possibility that the PIBKAC (heh). I may not have got the background color set up correctly when I first configured these images. Several key properties seem to reset every time you go in to make a minor adjustment, and I may not have got the background color set again. Until some of the weirdness in the editor is hammered out, I'm just going to leave it this way.